What is Magic besides some form of superintelligence, or at least the remnants of superintelligence? The strongest evidence is that magic-users and even creators don't really have to understand how the spells actually work in order to use them. There is information entering the system from somewhere, and it's enough information to accurately interpret the vague wand movements and sounds of humans and do sufficiently amazing things without too many chaotic side-effects. Even the chaotic side-effects are usually improbably harmless. It's like an almost-Friendly, or perhaps a broken previously-Friendly, AI. Possibly the result of some ancient Singularity that is no longer explicitly remembered.

I don't think you've understood what hypothetical apostasy is meant to be.

• They're meant to be against your current views. If you currently want to cure aging, as your most cherished belief, your hypothetical apostasy should be against SENS. So you definitely wouldn't want to put it into practice! (Unless you were convinced by it and changed your mind, in which case you'd now need a new hypothetical apostasy - your old one is now no longer hypothetical.

• They're meant to be private. If your utmost goal is to help the Greens win, writing a public, very convincing list of reasons why the Blues are right could be disasterous!

Eh, they're trying multiple ways of preservation to see what works best. We can't test which ones allow the best cyro-recoveries, but I don't see how it's de-facto not science.

Science means:

• Come up with a testable hypothesis

• Design an experiment to test it

• Perform the experiment

• Statistically evaluate the outcome and determine if it is evidence in favor or against the hypothesis

• Communicate the results to the scientific community

Science most definitely does not mean: "Let's try something random today and see what happens".

This is the core difference between scientific research and pre-scientific empiricism.

but stating that it's "factually false" that they do ANY research seems an overly strong claim.

The don't do any scientific research on their human corpses. They did some research on non-human animals in the past, but AFAIK, they didn't publish much.

Yes, but why run it on a computer at all? It doesn't seem likely to do you any good that way.

Suppose you make a super-intelligent AI and run it on a computer. The computer has NO conventional means of output (no connections to other computers, no screen, etc).

Why would you do that though?

Tangential: what's the difference between "signaling" and "indicating", and why does this post say "signal" rather than "indicate"?

(Perhaps "signaling" is American, "indicating" is British, and "blinking" is the colloquial term worldwide?)

It was clear to me from the beginning that it likely was a case of Generalizing From Few Examples (“[My test subjects and I don't like alcohol, therefore] nobody actually likes alcohol, and if you claim you do you're a liar!”), but I tried to keeping on reading. I had to stop at

(And FYI, that’s the proper spelling: extrovert is common but wrong, because extra- is the proper Latin prefix.)

No, etymology has little to do with whether a spelling is ‘wrong’. Extrovert it is the far more common spelling even in formal, edited prose (25 hits in the “Academic” section of the British National Corpus for extrover* vs 3 for extraver*) and it is the first spelling in plenty of major dictionaries. (Not to mention that the Italian word for that also has an O in the middle, so the alteration from the “proper Latin prefix” didn't even originally occur in English, unless the Italian word is re-borrowed from English.)

As for me, I prefer group brainstorming for certain tasks and individual brainstorming for other tasks.

I don't think the majority of the people who do this are male. I can think of half a dozen occasions just over the holidays where this was done by a woman (and I can recall only one male counterexample). She probably sees it otherwise given her politics, but I'd say it's equally split at best.

I do not expect her to make an equal opportunity blog post. However, you wanted to know why it's met with hostility by some people. The post sends out hostility towards men in an unspoken way, so it is responded to in kind.

It's refreshing to see the non-anastrophic arrangement in the title.

What LessWrong would call the "system" of rationality is the rigorous mathematical application of Bayes' Theorem. The "one thousand tips" you speak of are what we get when we apply this system to itself to quickly guess its behavior under certain conditions, as carrying around a calculator and constantly applying the system in everyday life is rather impractical.